Regional and local development strategies and programmes are now characteristic of all OECD Member countries. They may be concerned with a wide range of issues: economic competitiveness and growth; employment and local labour market issues; local public services; environmentally sustainable development. Many are multidimensional, covering several of these domains. Some are the result of purely local initiatives but many are initiated and supported by national policies and programmes. National governments support the development of regional and local strategies and programmes because of the key role local actors play in identifying solutions for local problems and in recognising locally specific opportunities for growth. However, while regional and local development interventions are widely seen to be of value, the measurement of their progress and impacts is often too weak to enable evidence-based policy improvements. Increasing and improving regional and local development monitoring and evaluation is therefore a priority. Each level of government – national, regional and local – has an important role to play in this effort. Each has an important role in collecting information, analysing it and exchanging it in order to improve management, policy and budget decisions. However, the benefits are likely to be strongest when this occurs within a clear and coherent national framework that is shared by all the main actors. For regional and local governments, following a clear national framework helps put in place good practice monitoring and evaluation approaches as well as to share information more easily with other areas that will help in policy design and building better strategies. For national government, a coherent national monitoring and evaluation framework provides evidence on the extent to which regional and local development interventions contribute to achieving national objectives for growth and reduction of disparities and how this contribution might be increased.

Project background and outputs

The project “Implementation guidelines on evaluation and capacity building for the local and micro regional level in Hungary” aimed to assist the Ministry for National Development and Economy of Hungary and its sub-national partners in creating the capacity to put into place an appropriate framework for the monitoring and evaluation of regional and local development trends and policies in Hungary. More in detail, the project was implemented in two phases, from May 2008 to June 2009 and it was intended to produce:

A report to set out the issues in establishing a successful strategic monitoring and evaluation framework for regional and local development in Hungary.

A guide to provide discussion of evaluation requirements and to give orientation on how to develop good evaluation, including a description of international best practices in local development evaluation that may be applied in Hungary.